Act I

My Father Lies

 

Naples, 1580

 

“HE MAKES YOU sleep, you know,” said Ariel, then. She—it was she, that day—kicked her airy heels against a convenient boulder. “When he tires of you. He makes you sleep.”

“I know,” I said. And then, when her faint expression saddened, “Don’t all good children sleep? Don’t all living creatures?”

“They do,” said Ariel. “But not like that.”

 

 

FEVER WRACKS ME as storms do ships. I cannot stay ahead of it; delirium blows me in narrowing circles, over and up and back again, yet doesn’t unmoor my body from its bloody pulse of pain. Miscarriage, the physician says, is a betrayal as wife, as woman, yet I feel more betrayed than betrayer. Or perhaps, like Caliban, I am merely the monstrous, wild creature that they say I am, as red of tooth as I am of hair—red, red. The sheets are red, and I twist against them, fevered and rimed with sharp, sweet salt that doesn’t know the sea.

“Will she live?” asks Ferdinand. He stands out of sight, but not beyond hearing. Is that his design, or by accident?

“She might,” the physician hedges. “The womb’s waters ought to protect against the incursion of foul humours during pregnancy, but in this state, with the waters gone”—I feel, more than see, the wave of his hand—“she is vulnerable.” He lowers his tone, but not his volume. Coughs. “Though it pains you to hear it, my lord, there is some correlation between women who eat scantly in childhood and women who struggle to bear in turn, and after being raised on an island—”

“Raised by a sorcerer, Ceasare. Raised by a duke and a wise man both.”

“A wise man who, by his own admission, cannot conjure food, no matter his pure intentions. My lord, I mean no slight to the Princess Miranda, but though she is surely beautiful, she is slim-hipped, small. She has no fleshy reserves with which to fight this fever, and if it continues to burn, I fear the worst. And even if she survives”—gently, over Ferdinand’s gulping—“you must consider the high likelihood of her future barrenness. Early miscarriage is often a predictor of such things, in my experience.”

“Barrenness? Truly?” Ferdinand’s voice is angry, blanched, and in that moment, I hate him as I have never hated anyone, not even the cruellest court ladies.

Those are pearls that were his eyes, my Ariel once sang, and through my rage I laugh at the thought, for my woman’s pearl was all in Ferdinand’s eyes; my chastity was the oyster he prised open in his pursuit of it, and now I fade, fade, fade to nothing, fevered and thin and red.

“She stirs! Ceasare, look!”

“I see her, my prince. Ah! Let me fetch some water.”

They press the cup to my lips. I do not drink.

 

 

“I SUPPOSE IT makes sense.” I drew my child’s knees to my chin, considering the problem. “After all, it would take an awful concentration to put every fish in the sea to sleep, and every ant and bird and mouse—unless it’s done in groups?”

Ariel shook her head. Her form was modelled on mine, though her hair moved with the buoyant lethargy of kelp in a current, coiling slowly around her face; or my face, rather. Ours.

“Does father sleep, then?” By my own logic, I supposed he must, though I’d never caught him at it.

“He sleeps when you sleep, so that you won’t wake him.”

“Wake him?” I wrinkled my nose in puzzlement. “How could he wake before he’s ready? Sleep doesn’t work like that.”

“Natural sleep does.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Shall I prove it?”

“If you can,” I dared.

(I often dared, then.)

 

 

BETWEEN ONE BLINK and the next, they leave. Or maybe more than a blink; my awareness, like my flesh, is shivershaken, unreliable. I stare at the ceiling: vaulted stones and painted angels. Will I ascend in death?

Something stirs beside the bed, a gust of air solidifying out of light and shadow.

“Miranda?” The voice is mine, but not-mine.

Ours, then.

“Ariel?”

I turn my head, and there she is—or there I am—or there we are, though her copy of me is unfevered and whole, her languid halo of bright red hair like fire around her (my, our) face.

“Oh, child.” A pale hand hovers across my brow. “I am so sorry. I shouldn’t have left you here. I abandoned you.”

“It’s not your fault. I wanted to come. I thought—” My throat goes dry, and I break off, sweating and shuddering at a fresh burst of pain. “I never thought it would be like this.”

“How could you have known? You knew nothing of men.”

I close my eyes. “I knew a little.”

“A little,” Ariel echoes softly. “But still. Not enough for this.”

 

 

AT MY CHALLENGE, Ariel became a leopard—or the shape I knew as leopard, without reference to an original—and invited me onto her back. Her pelt was soft, but translucent, blue-limned like a fire lit with salt-warped wood.

“Be silent,” she said, her voice a low rumble, and bore me up through the warm air, through the island’s green heart, until we found a colony of sleeping mice curled in a tree-knot. To my surprise, they stirred when I stroked them, waking with tiny squeaks.

The mice themselves delighted me, though I was sorry to have distressed them. I said as much to Ariel, who flew us back to the beach, assuring me that, once we’d gone, the mice would resettle themselves. No magic required.

 

 

“WHY HAVE YOU come here, Ariel? Why now?”

“At first, I was busy. Fairy business. I was on that island for a long time, child. I had to return to Titania’s court, to make my obeisances, pardons, pledges. I had to report and explain my absence. But after that—” She falters, looks aside. “After that, I was ashamed. And hopeful, too, just a little; I thought you might adjust, given time.”

“I could adjust, perhaps. But as they will not, I cannot—or if I did, there’d be no point to it.”

She doesn’t ask who they were. There’s no need.

“Do you love him?” Ariel asks, softly.

“Compared to what?” It comes out harsher than I intend, a pant of rage as pain saws through me. My father impressed on me the value of feminine virtues, and when the ship came—when Ferdinand came, and I finally had an audience—it was surprisingly easy to embody them, as though my flesh and feelings both had only awaited their function. But the world in which it was easy was a small, unvarnished one, as utterly distinct from my present state as shells from sapphires. If such a woman truly exists, she is not me, nor have I met her like, here in this place where my every move is scrutinised for the failings of barbarism. “Compared to how I once loved my father? Compared to how I should love myself? I do not.” Tears slip down my cheeks. “I do not, and now it’s all too late.”

“It doesn’t have to be.” Ariel kneels, or gives her airy form the semblance of kneeling. “You can leave this place, Miranda. Go where you will.”

“As a woman alone? One marked as spurned, or barren, or runaway from her lawful lord, and whose father in any case would drag her home again? Such choices you offer! Pearls to make a pauper rich.” My lucidity slips like a lady’s veil, restored by the cooling brush of Ariel’s hand.

“What if,” she says, and stops. On the island, I had no true glass, but this past year, I’ve grown enough accustomed to the sight of my face to recognise its expression now as one of fear, and grief, and defiant apology. “What if they thought you dead?”

 

 

“NATURAL SLEEP, LIKE natural life, is precarious,” said Ariel, alighting on the sand. Her leopard-voice was a rumbling purr. “Remember that, Miranda.”

“I will, but what does precarious mean?”

Ariel paused in the act of washing a paw. She twitched an ear, then popped back into our shared girlshape, toying with a curl. “It means unsafe, and subject to change. Like a sandbar moved by waves.”

I nodded; I was an expert on sandbars. Then, unbidden, a strange thought came to me. “The mice moved when I touched them,” I said. “Do I not move in my sleep?”

“You don’t,” she said. “No matter the provocation, you stay still.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s... comforting, I suppose.” My skin felt strangely cold. “Is it comforting, Ariel?”

Her eyes were mine, yet older than mine. “That depends,” she said.

“On what?”

“On the provocation.”

 

 

“THERE IS A spell,” says Ariel, when I say nothing. “A glamour of sorts, though a little more complex. All who know you here will think you dead of your childloss fever—which I can cure, in either case,” she adds, quickly. “You will live, Miranda. I owe you that much. But if you wanted—”

“Yes,” I say. I exhale relief like poison. I don’t know where I’ll go, if Ariel will take me there or merely provide me with a chance at departure, but I cannot stay here. My island was not wild, compared to this.

There are such monsters in a palace.